An Unfortunate Prairie Occurrence

Book 3: JULES CLEMENT

by Jamie Harrison

Genres: General Fiction; Small Town & Rural; Westerns; Mystery; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

“Harrison takes her time resolving these criminal matters, allowing us to linger in Blue Deer long enough to learn its history, drink in the scenery and laugh at the kinds and quirks of its idiosyncratic residents. No wonder the world-weary Jules came running back home the first chance he got—the place is heaven.” —The New York Times Book Review

“The third and best of Jamie Harrison’s laconic Montana mystery novels . . . The people of Blue Deer are more than just a cast. They are a community.” —Time

It’s the fall season in Blue Deer, and Jules is once again up to his crooked grin in trouble. A camper’s discovery of old bones threatens to expose secrets long and deliberately buried in the hearts and minds of the town’s eldest citizens. Jules’s investigation mushrooms into a nightmare of long-simmering enmities, love affairs, arson, and murder.

An Unfortunate Prairie Occurrence continues the exploits of Sheriff Jules Clement in this exciting installment of the critically acclaimed mystery series.

Release date: July 2, 2024

Publisher: Counterpoint

Print pages: 448

Sample

1

BONES

BLUE DEER BULLETIN

SHERIFF’S REPORT, WEEK OF OCTOBER 10–16

October 10—A woman complained about trash blowing out of a neighbor’s yard and into hers. An officer talked to the neighbor.

October 11—An officer responded to a child custody dispute at the Small Planet Daycare. Peace was achieved.

October 12—A woman reported neighbors were dumping refuse in her garbage cans, then making rude gestures and denying they had done so when she complained. An officer talked to the neighbors.

A citizen reported youths smoking a suspicious substance on Magpie Island. An officer warned the youths and took them home.

October 13—A man was reported shooting at phone and electric poles on Seventh Street. The man was apprehended.

October 14—A man reported that a bear was breaking the branches of his apple tree. He was advised to leave the bear alone.

A woman reported that her dog had been stolen, as well as a dog bowl and a sack of toys.

October 15—An abandoned van with mirror windows was reported on Barney Road. The caller worried someone might be inside.

October 16—A man reported that a group of hunters shot a deer within fifty feet of his house, hitting one of his cars, and left without making restitution. Officers are investigating.

THE WOODS WERE FILLED WITH IDIOTS, THE PLAINS with relatively intelligent local boys. The idiots struggled up mountain trails and lingered in dense, sterile stands of lodgepole pine, aiming at stray mice and wind shadows, marching into town every afternoon to drink whiskey and schnapps. The local boys lurked on the river bottoms, keeping their beer cold and safe in cottonwood roots, or simply stopped on dirt two-tracks and sighted in a promising specimen over their car hood.

Big game season had only begun at dawn on Sunday, and as an opening salvo that temperate, misty Monday morning, an antelope hunter from Cleveland blew off his best friend’s hand. They were only twenty yards from their truck in a wooded campground parking lot, and the “something” the shooter had seen flitting through the early-morning murk proved to have been an old copy of the Blue Deer Bulletin, left behind at a campsite.

Several other unfortunate things happened in Absaroka County, Montana, that October 17:

A woman named Mary McLinchey walked into the sheriff’s office in Blue Deer at 8:30 a.m. holding a year-old baby and reported that she had been raped. Grace Marble, the dispatcher, gave her an extra sweater, a cup of coffee and a doughnut, and after one of the deputies, Caroline Fair, took a preliminary report, McLinchey was driven to the hospital.

In a valley ten miles south of Blue Deer, a small woman named Edie Linders screamed in rage and threw a peanut butter sandwich at a tall man named Jules Clement. Jules happened to be the sheriff of Absaroka County, and he was late for work.

A former county native named Wayne Contway, now residing in the maximum-security wing at Deer Lodge, the state penitentiary, gave an interview in which he did an about-face on a decade of noisy innocence and admitted that not only had he killed his neighbor’s wife, he could show the authorities where to find her body in the alpine backcountry.

A Maryland hotel cook, in the fourth hour of a beer-drinking tour with his area hosts, suddenly demanded they stop the car on a particularly scenic bridge over the Yellowstone River south of Blue Deer. He climbed out, stripped off his shirt, dove into the river, and did not reappear.

At three that afternoon, an elderly obstetrician-gynecologist, Hans Craitson, shot arrows through his own picture window and inadvertently put one into the ear of a neighbor’s Jack Russell. He confided to Sheriff Clement that the dog was a nasty piece of shit but his real target had been the tires of his son’s Plymouth. The son demanded the father be arrested. Jules settled for confiscating the bow.

A couple from Pennsylvania set up camp on the tip of Magpie Island, which lay just southwest of town in the middle of the Yellowstone River. Once the tent was up, the man wandered off into the maze of willow saplings to answer the long-delayed call of nature, and pried up a large rock to make a hole. Underneath the rock he discovered the perfectly articulated bones of a human foot.

Jules, who’d begun to hate his profession for intellectual as well as visceral reasons, took everything personally that day. Being the town thug (this is how he saw the job lately; all its interesting moral ambiguity had been swamped by banality) filled him with self-pity and boredom. Most of his constituents filled him with annoyance and dread. The victims he dealt with filled him with pity and horror. That Monday’s flurry of activity only promised to give Jules less time to think, or at least less time to stop thinking over a drink.

Late that evening he sat at his desk, alone in the station but for the night dispatcher, hunkered down over a staff schedule in the yellow light of a desk lamp. He’d spent most of the afternoon searching the Yellowstone for the Maryland

swan diver. The diver’s hysterical friends, who had said repeatedly that he was the kind of guy who just wanted to have fun, thought that maybe he was pulling their legs, hiding in some willows downriver and giggling. Jules had answered that people didn’t usually joke around after a thirty-foot dive into three feet of water; he said their friend had turned into a turtle.

They’d looked for the turtle until dusk, then tarped a hundred square feet of Magpie Island in the last light of the day. Jules, peering down at the foot and part of an ankle with a flashlight, wasn’t sure if the evident age of the bones would be a blessing or a curse. The other old body would have to wait even longer. Wayne Contway, a former hunting guide, claimed to have buried her eight miles from a trailhead in the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness, somewhere in the middle of two thousand square miles of grizzlies that were slow to hibernate in a bad berry year. That trip, probably a two-nighter, would have to wait until later in the week, and Jules would have to bring the asshole along for directions. Maybe Contway had confessed for the sake of some fresh air.

Both Cleveland hunters would survive, though a great friendship had probably ended. Mary McLinchey, the woman who’d been raped, claimed to be fine, but she had more of Jules’s sympathy than the other wounded or the dead. The man who had raped her was his biggest problem: Mary was the third woman to be attacked since summer.

Jules worked until eleven, then walked to the Blue Bat Tavern. There were a dozen men and women scattered around the dark room, and he knew almost all of them because he’d been born in Blue Deer, and he liked bars. Delly Bane, the owner, recognized potential entertainment and bought him a whiskey. That afternoon’s Bulletin had been a hot commodity, and Jules’s fellow drinkers were frankly curious, torn between the idiotic hunting accident, a tourist who’d misjudged the river, and a local who’d finally confessed. No one mentioned the rape, and the island bones had been discovered after the paper went to press. At midnight Jules headed home to his own house, to sleep alone. He had no intention of apologizing to Edie.

2

NAMES

JULES CLEMENT WAS BROWN-HAIRED, TALL AND angular. He was thirty-five and essentially solitary, currently locked into an unhappy phase in an at best intermittent love life. He had a fairly good sense of humor, but it had been beaten down of late by work. He was good at his job, despite a lack of self-confidence or despotic practicality. Jules was that final anomaly, a liberal officer of the law.

Whatever else could be said about Jules, no one had ever claimed he looked like a cop when out of uniform. A bartender, maybe, a carpenter or even a ski bum in his healthier moments. This morning, waiting in a corner of the Honorable Miles Birdland’s office to have an arrest warrant signed, he looked a bit like a fishing guide: he was wet to the knees from a dawn search for the missing Maryland diver. Four boats, twenty other searchers on the banks, all of it a massive waste of time undertaken largely to save a fisherman a nasty sight a week down the line.

Jules paged through the judge’s magazines and politely avoided looking directly at the other people in the room.

Neil Amundsen, the judge’s grandson and a deputy county attorney, was arguing, and he sounded reasonable enough until the gist of the conversation sank in.

“Mr. Jump had custody for September; Mrs. Jump had custody for October. It’s spelled out in their agreement, alternate months.”

Birdland’s voice was querulous, dangerous. “He wanted to take the dog hunting, right?”

“Yes sir,” said Peter Johansen, the defense attorney. “Their agreement cites that right, for the dog’s own welfare. This is petty stuff.”

“The mention is vague, and any hunting was to depend on Mrs. Jump’s assent,” Neil began. “Instead of asking her, Mr. Jump kidnapped the dog—”

“Spare me,” said Miles Birdland. “You keep your mouth shut as well for a moment, Mr. Johansen.” He shuffled through his papers, a thin, tall man, quick and graceful in his mid-seventies, with a border of dark hair and a bald spot that managed to look distinguished. He tended to listen intently while blinking slowly, at regular intervals Jules had timed during dozens of tedious testimonies. Sometimes Birdland seemed to simply fix on a face and unleash poetic venom, the way a shark might fix on a particular pair of thrashing legs at a crowded beach and bite. The man had a nose for assholes.

“This is a clear case of custodial interference,” said Neil. “He came onto her property, broke her window to open her door—”

“If you’d like to push for burglary or property damage, be my guest. Waste county money. But I am not going to allow you to bring criminal charges against a man for taking his dog from his ex-wife—”

“Your Honor, you’re showing bias by saying ‘his’ dog.”

There was an ominous silence. Jules lifted his eyes and met Peter’s. Peter gave a tiny, desperate shake of the head and stayed poker-faced. He’d gone back to being an attorney a few months earlier, after playing hooky as a reporter for several years, and since he’d taken on county defense work he’d had time to fish exactly twice. Jules, who’d only fished three times in the same span, lacked the guts to inquire if the income boost had been worth the pain.

The judge tapped his pen violently on a pile of paperwork. “Neil, do you think I’m blessed with an abundance of time?”

Neil, only in his late twenties, had a surly look on his face that tamped down the handsome features and made them small and mean. “No sir.”

“What do you imagine I’d rather be doing?”

Jules feigned interest in a National Geographic article on mining in Indonesia. Peter stared at the ceiling. “Taking a walk?” asked Neil with just an edge of the smart-ass.

“Sitting with your dying grandmother!” screamed Birdland. “Now either go for a b-and-e or leave it to civil court!”

Meetings with Birdland often ended in this fashion. He’d been district judge for thirty years and tended toward brutal efficiency during court time, though his written opinions were Gothic and dense. You couldn’t count on his sympathies, which his defenders took as proof of a lack of bias, and which nonfans, including Peter Johansen, put down to everything from indigestion to reactionary politics to simple, old-fashioned meanness. Miles Birdland didn’t have a predictable knee-jerk reaction to certain types, had no special blood lust for teenage dropouts, drinking mothers, child support shirkers, pot smokers versus drinkers versus pill poppers.

“Why are you here?” he asked Jules abruptly.

“Alston Hantz blew his parole twice over the weekend, and I need a warrant signed.”

“Jesus,” said the judge. The top of his head was still pink with rage. “Enough is enough.”

“You would think,” said Jules. “But Alston doesn’t think.”

“Did he at least try to be sneaky?”

“Showed up drunk as a monkey for happy hour at the Blue Bat on Friday, then hit the Bucket Sunday afternoon.”

“I won’t feel much

compunction about sending him out of the county,” said Birdland, handing Jules the warrant and moving on to the rest of his pile.

As if he ever felt compunction, Jules thought. He started to edge out the door, but the judge spoke again. “There’s a rumor going ’round that you found a body on the island,” he said, signing papers as fast as his secretary could hand them to him.

“Yes sir,” said Jules. “Yesterday afternoon.”

“Old or new?” The judge didn’t look up.

“Old,” said Jules. “Maybe several decades, unless there’s something funny in the soil. I won’t know more until I get out of here.”

Birdland looked up and Jules kept his face unreadable, not a difficult task as his left jaw was crooked from a horse kick. That corner of his mouth tended to curl up in a gentle and often unfelt smile.

“Sorry to keep you from more important tasks,” said Birdland with great sarcasm.

“That’s, of course, not how I meant the comment,” said Jules evenly.

The judge had missed a page, and when his secretary murmured a mild corrective he snatched it from her hand. “Well, good,” he said finally. “I was wondering if we’d have another mess on our hands, if I should simply retire now, let Axel age himself.”

Miles Birdland was not given to humor; in the words of his tenacious secretary, now staring fixedly at the diplomas on the wall, the man was too dry to spit. Axel Scotti was the county attorney, Neil’s boss, and he wanted Birdland’s job, though probably not enough to run against an institution in the next election.

“No mess,” said Jules. “I’m only worried about the rapist.”

“I’d be surprised if you catch that man before I retire. I knew someone like him once, a man who kept his evil invisible in the daytime. This person could be the town’s finest teacher, saving up pain for the night.”

Encouraging words. Jules felt a glimmer of pity for Neil, who crawled in to apologize to his grandfather as Jules was walking out. It wasn’t always easy, everyone being related to everyone else. Hardly any of the first settlers in Absaroka County had stuck it out, but in a town of new blood, virtually none had oozed through the courthouse walls. Until Axel Scotti had pushed the county’s lenient standards of nepotism that spring by hiring a twenty-six-year-old with only one year of experience, no one in town had seemed to mind that Scotti was married to Jules’s cousin Jetta, or that Jules and Peter had been roommates in college, or that Birdland’s daughter and Scotti’s wife had been inseparable since kindergarten. Now Jules found himself minding; it was part of the reason he’d hired two out-of-towners as deputies that summer.

“What are you smiling at?” snapped Neil.

“Life’s infinite variety,” said Jules.

He walked down the hall toward the sheriff’s department, past a procession of flanking photographs, black-and-white images of Absaroka County’s increasingly inbred legal system. The most recent photos came last: Jules himself, looking fettered in a tie; Axel Scotti, fifty, vain and charcoal-haired; and Miles Birdland, who’d looked every bit as poisonous twenty years before as he did on the bench now. The older photos nearer to the courtroom echoed the current ones: Jules’s father, Ansel Clement, was framed above the office dates 1966–1972; Scotti’s great-uncle Tomas had ruled as county attorney and judge for twenty-five years, from World War II into the early sixties. In a county with only one hundred years of history, such a chunk of time meant having your name on at least a street. There was a Scotti Avenue and a Scotti wing on the hospital and a Scotti band shell. Even Ansel Clement had rated a playground. His photo was also displayed in the west wing of the building near the sheriff’s department, part of a small panel dedicated

to what Jules thought of as the working dead. The end of Ansel’s tenure, 1972, had also been the year he ticketed the wrong trucker. Jules had been thirteen, past the age to find a playground with his last name much consolation for a father’s shotgun murder.

In the property records room he checked through deeds and surveys, scanning the shape and ownership of Magpie Island back to the first records. The ass end of the island, the downriver tip, had been much bigger in the 1940 survey, having gained considerable ground in a 1921 flood, and had lost this same ground gradually over the next fifty years until another big flood in 1993 changed its shape. The current owner was absentee, and the former owner, now deceased, had owned the land through the sixties and seventies. He’d bought it in 1966 from Joseph Clement Ganter, who’d acquired it in 1936 as part of an inheritance from his grandfather, a homesteader named Jens Ansel Clement.

The family relationships weren’t spelled out, but Jules knew them because they were—again—his own. Joseph was Axel Scotti’s father-in-law and Jules’s second or third cousin, though Jules regarded him as an uncle; Jens was Jules’s great-great-grandfather. Jules’s own grandfather Charlie had gotten a 640-acre parcel for an eighteenth birthday gift, too, but he’d pissed it away and died before World War II; his widow had married an equally short-lived pharmacist. As an end result, the Ganter side of the family had fifteen or so thousand acres, and the Clements had two small bungalows in town, a collection of old cars, and the habit of travel.

Jules drummed his pencil violently until the clerk looked up in annoyance, and then he simply stared blankly into space. Through the glass wall he saw Neil Amundsen, tall and graceful, strut down the hallway toward a dark-haired woman in a deputy’s uniform who was talking to a parole officer. Neil smiled and spoke to the woman, and Jules, rather than waiting to see if the woman smiled back, lurched to his feet, threw the files back into the drawer, and headed for the hall to break things up.

Neil was joking about a lunatic Caroline Fair had ferried from the Greyhound station to the hospital the afternoon before, then retrieved from the hospital and brought to the jail that morning after the man’s medication had worn off and a doctor had quickly and accurately diagnosed him as criminally insane. “Peter needed a can of Lysol to introduce himself.”

“He was fairly fragrant,” said Caroline mildly. “They were going to try to clean him up at the hospital.”

“Well,” said Neil, “he’d wiped himself with you-know-what.”

Caroline looked blank.

“Excrement,” said Jules. “That’s shit to you, Neil.”

Neil stared. Jules decided to be unrepentant. “Your day getting any better?”

“It was,” said Neil.

“Well,” said Jules, “I’d hate to get in the way of progress. He turned to Caroline. “Did you get anywhere with Mary McLinchey?”

“I ran more pictures by her,” said Caroline, glancing nervously at Jules, then at Neil’s angry back.

“Anyone look familiar?”

“No, but she keeps going for the same physical type, brunette with light eyes, blue or gray. She’s been comparing other people’s heights, and she thinks he was between five-ten and six feet.”

They started walking toward the station offices. “Can you take my Thursday shift?” asked Jules.

The look she gave him

 was mildly bemused. Caroline specialized in such looks, from heavy-lidded eyes. Her face was fine, very pale compared to her almost-black hair, but with gazes that said “Are we both speaking English, little boy?” she became austere and forbidding. Jules thought she was beautiful. Peter thought she looked cold, which didn’t mean he didn’t agree. “For the Contway trip? When are you planning to leave?”

“Tomorrow morning, early.”

Bemusement turned to disbelief. “In a blizzard?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Ed said we were getting a blizzard at the end of the week, that there’s a front moving down. He said you could see it starting in the air.”

Jules turned to stare through a window at the dulcet afternoon and found that the air was crisp but otherwise invisible. Ed Winton was the oldest deputy, and his sense of humor was ripe. “You believe everything he says to you?”

“Not everything,” said Caroline. “But when I took this job, I remember you telling me to listen to Ed.”

When she’d taken the job there’d been the implicit notion that she’d listen to Jules.

ABSAROKA COUNTY, MONTANA, was six thousand square miles, a long, narrow county in the southwestern part of the state, running down the border of the Rocky Mountain front to Yellowstone Park. It had lush valleys and trout-laden rivers, forbidding mountains and unkind weather. The people were similarly varied and always had been: on the one hand, Montana had sent the first woman to the U.S. Senate before women actually had the right to vote; on the other hand, Blue Deer schoolboys had been allowed to carry guns to the classroom until 1911.

Jules ate a sandwich in the sun in the back parking lot of the station, leaning against the building with a newspaper spread on a car hood in front of him. It was the one place the mayor, who always parked in front so that people knew he actually worked, would never find him. While he ate, he read the weather forecast in Monday afternoon’s paper, which promised that the world would continue to be “mild and seasonable.” Not that seasonable meant much in Montana, but only the most paranoid individual would take it for a blizzard forecast. Possibly Ed was using Caroline for an elaborate joke.

Jules walked back inside and approached Grace Marble, the station’s sixty-year-old dispatcher-commandant, at an angle. She finished with a nasty-sounding dog complaint and glared up at him over her glasses.

“What time are they taking off from Deer Lodge tomorrow with that asshole?”

She raised a single eyebrow. “Mr. Contway and his escort were planning to leave after lunch and be here for dinner. I had the impression regular meals were important.”

“Will you call for the new weather report?”

The other black eyebrow arched as she reached for the phone. Grace had a talented face, and with it had trained almost everyone to follow silent commands. Five minutes later she marched to his desk, cleared her throat, and read aloud from notes.

“We can expect snow above five thousand feet, locally heavy, before dark tomorrow. The lows shouldn’t be too bad, ten or twenty, but the white stuff should continue through Friday.”

“How much?”

Grace smiled sweetly. “Hardly anything in town, but a shitload where you’re going, dear.”

Jules mimicked this last clause as she walked away and he dialed. It was mid-October, after all; at eight thousand feet it might as well be January. Given a choice, why would anyone sleep outside in such a season? The warden of Deer Lodge sounded nonplussed when Jules stated the impossibility of a fifteen-mile round-trip on horseback in two feet of new snow. The warden suggested he send Wayne Contway that afternoon anyway and let Jules store him in Absaroka County. Wayne was all packed, it seemed, and that way Jules would be ready to go into the mountains at the drop of a hat. Maybe Wayne would feel more at home in Blue Deer, volunteer some information. Jules should also know that the horseback idea had an innate flaw: Wayne had found considerable solace in prison food.

“We’re not just talking chubby,” said the warden.

Jules added another item to his day’s list, a reminder to request the outfitter to bring along a draft horse. They set the departure date for the following Monday, and the warden promised he’d send good help. Jules shook off a vision of pit bulls in crew cuts and tried to get off the phone, but the man had one last thought: just between him and Jules, no one would be heartbroken if Wayne should fail to make the return trip. A coronary would be likely, and Wayne was the right shape to roll down an incline like a greasy snowball.

“He’s a pain in the ass?” asked Jules.

“He’s a world-class whiner,” answered the warden. “It’s hard to put into words.”

Ah, thought Jules, staring at the calendar after he’d hung up. Another reason to go on living.

ANYONE WHO’S BEEN shot, battered, ridden horses, incurred a hangover, or been in an auto accident has a personal concept of the fragility of bones, but in Jules’s case all these pleasant experiences had been amplified by a Scandinavian sensibility and a previous career as an archaeologist. Jules had not only sifted through bones but thought about them, deeply and at length, and for once could actually bring real knowledge to bear on a job riddled with gas station robberies, domestic abuse, mistreated animals, and bad checks. He understood, more thoroughly than most people who attempt to keep public order, how recently a shell of civility had covered life.

Much of the digging Jules had done around the Mediterranean had revealed violent death, but such death had been run-of-the-mill. Sack, rape, burn, and break the crockery for some poor studious fool to puzzle over centuries later, smug in the belief that it would never happen to him. Even lovely Blue Deer could erode such a feeling of safety, if you saw it from the inside out as Jules had over the last three years. When he’d come home and decided to be a cop, he’d underestimated the vast difference between wiggly live problems and long-dead ones. If he’d had any sense, he’d have continued his earlier career in his home state by excavating Paleolithic campsites and buffalo jumps. Instead he’d fallen into his late father’s profession out of a combination of laziness and a fuzzy sense of duty, tumbled into what his mother, who’d recently been reading a good deal of popular psychology, called “the father thing.”

That morning he’d loaded his old tools—screens and brushes, picks and shovels—from a large dusty crate into his patrol car trunk. It was almost two by the time he moved a stack of mail and a spool of measuring tape so that Ed Winton could fit his ample butt on the passenger seat. Wesley Tenn followed them over the island bridge in the county van. For the first half hour they checked out the lay of the island, cleaning up obviously recent trash and

finding a sun-bleached rib in the willows near the northern edge in the process. A vertebra poked out of the eroded bank, but no one had noticed it, and possibly no one would have if the camper hadn’t dug an impromptu latrine. The bones were deeper where the bank had eroded, buried by successive layers of silt while the top half gradually disappeared downriver in flood after flood. The foot discovered under the rock was only eight inches deep, and whoever had buried the body had probably thrown it in that way, hastily and facedown and on a slant, heaping it with rocks that still showed clearly under the silt in the bank.

Perhaps someone had found the missing spine and ribs and skull decades earlier, far downriver. Jules would have to call the departments along the length of the Yellowstone, maybe even a chunk of the Missouri—could a skull navigate a dam? Wesley Tenn pointed out that where he came from, in New Mexico, stray skulls were always bobbing out of the gravel, freed from old graves; everyone assumed they were native, and no one worried much about them. This was probably just another forlorn settler buried in the wrong place. Jules decided that he liked this theory.

Harvey Meyers showed up at five, just in time to relieve Ed and take part in the heavy digging. Harvey, who always had to take an unhappy stand on something, bemoaned his luck for the next hour until Wesley, who’d started the job only that summer and was still capable of being annoyed, began deliberately shoveling sand in his direction. They staked the area, boxed cross sections of the silt, and removed the dirt above the skeleton itself, moving up from the feet. The exposed tibia were long and elegant, and there was clear evidence of a well-healed break in the right ankle. The legs weren’t old relative to others Jules had dug from the ground—the man had died sometime in the first half of the century—and from another perspective they were big strong young bones, from a man in his prime, no younger than twenty or older than thirty.

“You’re sure?” asked Wesley, confused by Jules’s unexpected expertise.

“Or a six-foot woman who never reached puberty,” said Jules, labeling another manila envelope.

He wasn’t really being glib: the pelvis was almost certainly male. The remnants of clothing—pale canvas pants and cotton boxers, a simple leather belt with a buckle shaped like a horse’s head, and equally fine shoes—were post-World War I but probably pre-Korea.

Wesley turned the buckle over in his hands. “Brass,” he said, “but still shiny. It’s pretty.”

“That’s gold,” said Jules. “This probably wasn’t your ordinary cowboy.”

The shoes were beside the feet rather than on them. Ed, who’d stayed on to watch, was amused and popped a second beer while he opined that removing shoes seemed more the sign of a suicide than a murder.

“He didn’t bury himself,” said Jules mildly. And whoever had buried him hadn’t done so with respect. In almost a decade of digging up bodies, the only times they’d ever faced the earth had been in mass graves, and then only when buried by their enemies. A half hour later they found two flattened slugs in the sand inside the pelvis. Even Ed agreed that not many people intent on peace shot themselves twice in the gut.

It was a beautiful afternoon, sixty or so in the sun and typical of an exceptionally late and easy fall: one hard frost in early September that a few lucky gardeners had managed to survive, good fishing without much wind yet, almost too hot for bird hunting. It wasn’t like a fall day in the Midwest or Northeast, with the cold wet sweet smell of dying leaves and apples; or the fecund dormancy of the South; or the frozen, dusty air of the higher Southwest, which felt as if everything once alive had simply blown away.

From where Jules stood on the river, fall smelled of clean clay, water, moistened rock and drying grass and pine. If you were to die of a belly wound, facedown in the wet sand, this was as beautiful a place to do it as any. The soft breeze blended with the sound of water and swirling aspen leaves, and they dug in the midst of violently colored gold-and-orange willow saplings and garnet dogwood. Jules filtered sand, scraping patiently away at a top layer of teenagers’ cigarette butts a few feet in either direction around the body. His familiarity with this end of the island dated back to high school, when it had been the best place to drink and smoke. It still was, despite several new houses and a sheriff whose life experience had made him scarily attuned to misbehavior. Both he and Harvey had giggled out here twenty years earlier, and giggled again now when they found an especially antique roach clip. They didn’t show it to Ed, who was now in his mid-fifties and had once been their worst nightmare.

Within the bones they found the remnants of what might have been a leather wallet with some coins, a nail scissors, and no trace of identification. Most of the coins were from the twenties and thirties, with a couple of strays, higher in the sand, from later decades. They also found a piece of tattered plaid, a tin of chewing tobacco, and, beneath the pelvis in the finest sieve, a nice pile of blond pubic hair. Jules felt pretty smug about this last, and even Harvey, almost pigment-free himself, became punchy toward dusk and made jokes about naturally blond cowboys.

Wesley, whose middle name was Arturo and whose mother had been born on a Sonoran ranch, wondered how people so waxy had won the West.

“We bred like rabbits,” said Harvey, one of eight children. ...